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Leveling Heroes

Experience For Your Hero

I haven't seen a good post about experience farming in a good 2 years or so. Some credit on this post goes to Dervin, who wrote one of the original FULL guides back in January of 2010. I've included some of his information, as well as my own updates in this post.

There are 3 main ways to gain experience for your hero.

(1) Using items.
(2) Being mayor while a new building is being constructed, research finishes, or troops are made
(3) (The most common) Through attacking other players, valleys, and NPC's

Using Items
There are three different items that can be used to increase a hero's experience. There pretty self-explanatory, but just in case...

Each item offers either a percent increase or a given number of experience points. Generally, lower level heros tend to get the number of experience since their level cap isn't that high. (The level cap is the total number of experience points needed to reach the next level) Once your hero gets to level 100 lets say, and he/she needs 500,000 experience points and you use the Anabasis, well since 8% of 500,000 is more than 1,000, your hero will get 8% of 500,000 added to their experience.

(3) On War - Increase hero's experience by 100,000 or 100% of current level cap

This is typically the least common way of increasing a hero's experience since you either need to buy these items or win them off the wheel. And once you get to a high enough level, 8% hardly puts a dent in your experience.

Being Mayor While Troops Are Made and Buildings Are Built

The experience you receive from making troops only goes to the mayor of your city when the troops are FINISHED being made, not when you originally que them up. The following is a list of how much experience you get per troop that is made.

Trebs are a very popular method of building experience in the later days of the game. At 1066 politic, Trebs are built instantly. When building a full 11,000 trebs, you gain 995,000 exp. Demolish them to regain 30% of the resources, or have a friend attack you to drop honor, and do it all over again. This method is more costly than level 10 farming; however, it can be much quicker due to the limitations on how many NPC's a hero can farm per day.

For the buildings and technologies, until I think of a nicer-looking way of presenting these numbers, I will list the type of building/tech, and then 10 numbers, representing the given mayor experience for it. As a note, unlike troops you cannot have more than one of these finishing at once, so the numbers are rounded down to the nearest integer.

As you all know (I hope) the most common way to get experience for your hero is to send him/her on an attack. Thanks to a post by captain virk, with information from aom12, and I have also tested this information as well. In order to find out how much experience your hero will get multiply the number of troops you KILL in battle, not the total amount of troops lost on both sides.

The following is a list of how much experience you will get assuming you destroy every last enemy troop, including traps, abaitis, and logs. The number in parenthesis is how much experience you'll get if you only send ballistae and transporters, simulating a farming situation. Of course your results may vary depending upon how many traps, abaitis, and logs you take out when you attack.

When you look at this, it's clear why level 10's give you a huge jump in experience, it's because you take out almost all the wall defenses of the NPC. Which explains why you get more experience when you send warriors along with your NPC attack, it's because you're taking out more of the NPC wall defenses. The number in parenthesis is the amount of experience you'll get if you don't set off any traps, abaitis, or rolling logs. And of course the first number is if you eliminate every single enemy troop.

Of course attacking valleys and other players will give your hero experience too, but it depends on how many troops and defenses they have, and you can figure this out using the chart above, or captain virk's guide as well.

Despite what many people think, attacking a level 10 NPC with archers produces 20 times more experience than farming a level 5 NPC with only ballistae. The only real way to get experience fast is to attack level 10's. The resources regenerate every 8 hours, the troops regenerate every hour, so if you solely wanted experience you could attack a LvL 10 NPC 24 times a day in theory (if you didn't sleep) which would be a theoretical maximum of 44,760,000 experience per NPC per day. Of course you could just attack other NPC's in your area as well, although I don't think the resources and troop loss would be worth attacking every hour.

So here are the stats for farming a LvL 10 NPC, the cost of making archers, and what you gain and lose from each attack.

A LvL 10 NPC has

-19,000,000 food
-600,000 lumber
-600,000 iron

Your losses from an NPC should range from 3,000 to 8,000 archers, if not then you shouldn't be attacking them. I figured the average, which for you smart ones out there is a loss of 5,000 archers per attack.

Resources Needed to Make 5k Archers

- 1,500,000 Food
- 1,750,000 Lumber
- 1.500,000 Iron

Net Resource Gain From A Level 10 NPC attack (not including layers)

> +17,500,000 Food
> -1,150,000 Lumber
> -900,000 Iron

Another thing to consider is time. Depending upon your attack hero and how many barracks you have in your city. I'd say a decent time to replenish 10,000 archers should be around 2 or 3 hours when spread evenly throughout your barracks. Those of you on later servers might even have instant archers and be able to produce 25k+ per hour/city.

If there's any other way to earn experience faster than this then please let me know.

Also note that experience is cut in half if you do not win a battle. This means either you did not kill all of the enemy defense of the fight lasted 100 rounds.

In the event this happens, it basically means a fight that would have earned you 20mil exp, will only earn 10mil. When staging fights, such as those involving instant trebs, you must take this into account. If you win the fight, you will gain honor. Roughly 100-400k depending on the troop types. If you lose the battle, such as you would by sending a SB, your exp will be cut in half. For those of you with insta trebs, attacking someone with insta trebs, I have a little trick for you.

Player 1 builds 11k trebs, and has 1+ honor.
Player 2 attacks player 1, with 99k scouts 1k cavs, and has 0 honor.

Player 2 builds 11k trebs, and has 280k honor.
Player 1 attacks player 2 with 99k scouts, 1k cavs, and has 0 honor.

Player 1 wins, gains 280k honor, player 2 loses 280k honor.

Continue this in an endless cycle, and you can get 50-65% heal on both sides, and get double the exp. Basically, you would be losing 7000-11000 scouts after heal to gain 1.3mil exp. This is actually much cheaper than farming level 10 npcs, except you don't have any resource gain to make up for the losses. The players will also gain 100-200k exp for rebuilding their trebs.

pretty nice guide. have a question.
should i level my intel hero just like my att heros?

Yes, although there's really not too much need for plain intel heroes later in the game. They have 2 main uses, mech heroes, and defense heroes. For a mech hero, 163 is the max benefit for intel, so most people will convert a 400atk hero to 163 intel and 250+atk, and then grow the attack from there. For a defense intel hero, these are rarely used, but sometimes good to have. The only issue is that they max out at over 800 intel for archers, and they need to be the highest attack hero in the city to fight. When you're talking about levels that high up, it's usually easiest to just convert your 2nd or 3rd atk hero to intel later in the game.

As for the beginning of the game, use it to farm level 5 npcs until it hits 163-200 intel. Don't bother going past that, as things will equal out later in the game and it will become pretty much useless except as a mech hero.

Originally Posted by Prodigy the 5

i dont really see a need for another of these guides. Even if one hasnt been made for a while. Dont get me wrong. Its a good guide but nothing new.

Right, not made to be new information; It's just a refresher. For myself, the numbers are more help than the actual guide itself. After 3 years, it's very rare to find new information on age 1. The main problem for most players is finding the best way to combine and utilize the information that we currently have.

Actually its good to see one of these guides popping up again, Helps the next generation of noobs get a kick start at the game. While information is not new, it is still usefull, and has it all in one easy access location.

Far simpler then looking through 2 or 3 different threads as i did when learning that stuff.

pretty nice guide. have a question.
should i level my intel hero just like my att heros?

Intel heros dont throughly have a point in the game once you get better but i have 2 200 intel heros for the hell of it i use to farm 5 and get medals on a server that the drop rate sucks on also if you 0 loss 5's just train on 5's

Politics heroes can be trained in the same manner as attack heroes. Flip your pol hero to attack using holy water, get its attack to roughly 180 and pound away on those level 10's. Don't level it up from here on in, so that it won't take loads of holy water to flip it back to pol. Once it's at a level you desire, roughly what would be 853 pol, if you have a few WoN knocking around.

You can also train pol heroes on lv10, without converting them. You must send the attack to land approx 15 min (you may get away with more than this, been a long time since I did it this way) after an attack lead by an attack hero. This will just be purely an experience run and expect the same losses as a normal 10 hit, but with around 1 mil exp.

Another way, is to use warriors on lv6 to lv8 npc, these can be hit with any hero, with any attack. 99k warr and 1k trans if you are farming them, or just 100k warriors if you are exp farming only. I believe lv6's average the best res to troop loss per hit. You get losses averaging between 20k (lv6) and 50k (lv8) roughly.

There are calculators out there that make it easy to work out the experience required.

There is a way to work out how much experience you will need for a certain level with out this.

Lets take 638 for an example. To work out how much experience you will need for this level use 638 x 638 x 100 = 40704400 exp required for this level.

Thank you to the poster who has already posted this in a previous thread somewhere on this forum, I can't remember your name I am so sorry.

Last edited by Eartha; 06-22-2012 at 11:08 AM.
Reason: MiraLicious raised a valid point in the next post

If you wanted to really elevate it to a top notch guide, I'd suggest the following:
1. Put in some pictures. I know it's dumb, but most people don't like to read walls of text with no eye candy to break it up. You can toss them in as shown in point 2 and then maybe explain why they work so people can tweak them as needed.
2. Put in some suggested methods for training heroes under unusual conditions, ie. Level 10 Hits with Poli Heroes:
or Level 10 Hits with below 10 techs:

Anyway, good guide and thanks for spending the time to make it as detailed as possible

Originally Posted by cushseth

I hope with all my heart you are not stupid enough to believe the nonsense your spewing with your fingertips via keyboard.

Originally Posted by cushseth

I tell people they do well when they do well. It's not my fault people are stupid.